Just when you think you’ve seen everything Jean-Luc Godard has ever shot, something like this surfaces. If you’re only now considering tucking into the feast that is Godard’s filmography, don’t let his abundance of uncollected odds, ends, clips, and shorts intimidate you. Not only do they promise a little thrill down the road when you’ve already digested his major works, but they offer quick bursts at any time of the revolutionary cinematic zest with which the filmmaker took on the world. With the man alive and working, I should perhaps say “the revolutionary cinematic zest with which the filmmaker takes on the world,” but that gets into one of the most fascinating conversations that swirls around him: has Godard still got it?

He took over from the specialists and operated the camera from the window of Leacock-Pennebaker‘s office on West Forty-fifth street, shooting the band on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel across the street. (Pennebaker recalled him to be an amateurish cameraman who could not avoid the beginner’s pitfall of frequent zooming in and out.) The performance took place without a permit, at standard rock volume: as singer Grace Slick later wrote, “We did it, deciding that the cost of getting out of jail would be less than hiring a publicist…”

Amateurish or not, a piece of the footage has surfaced on YouTube. Listen to the Airplane perform “The House at Pooneil Corners,” watch Godard’s dramatic swings of focus and zoom as he attempts to convey the spectacle of the band and the spectacle of countless surprised Manhattanites at once, and think for yourself about this peculiar intersection of two bold lines in the era’s alternative zeitgeist. As Jefferson Airplane co-founder Paul Kantner said in a 1986 interview, “Just for a while there, maybe for about 25 minutes in 1967, everything was perfect.” But these seven minutes in November 1968, from opening shouts to inevitable arrest, don’t seem so dull themselves.

The Airplane were all about trying to evolve us to a better place, maybe naively so. House at Pooneil is an angry piece of music from a thoroughly unsettled time, the idea was to wake everyone up – in this case literally AND figuratively. I would have killed to be there and I wish this kind of passion still existed.

Fantastic. FEEDS YOUR HEAD now more than ever when a big deal is to keep ATM fees at just $2 max… Really now that’s all we got to match up with the Airplane??
Caught them up at SUNY New Paltz and unforgetable.
Loved that pair looking up from their window right below (famous or not). They looked like could star in a Godard.

Ricky Leacock and D A Pennebaker (my father) made that performance happen. Godard had pretty much signed off on the film by then. He wanted to go home. See our website for more info on it at phfilms.com

At 16 in NYC a west village tennibopper as they
Called us we were at almost every show, the free ones in the park, the Fillmore gigs, Woodstock, Atlantic
City. Often pared with the Dead, jagger in Altmont, referred to them as the Grateful Airplane.. We laughed at thier jealously. The west Coast gave us a playful funk and the pranksters, while Millbrook meditated, Frisco Froliced !

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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.